It’s the “strain” on the body by the excess fat that counts (heart pumping / clogged arteries etc)
So, let’s say someone over consumes 500 calries per day, or 3500 per week which is a 1lb of fat. Over one year that’s 52lbs or 3.7 stone - over 6 years that’s 300 extra lbs. There are very very few people who consume even at that level.
Over a 60 year lifetime there is not a lot of wriggle room if we think calries restriction is the way to go
I suspect it’s part of the “food is a class issue / some people are genetically disadvantaged / social taste as gatekeeper of power “ morass
I calculated, that my obesity amounted to 1 teaspoon of sugar extra, every day.
Our bodies are excellent, miraculous regulating machines if they can stay within those tolerances regardless of what kind of shit we put in.
The bad news is, for everybody who wants to lose weight, that we have much less free will when it comes to eating than we think. To lose weight long term we need to fix whatever caused the regulating machinery to malfunction as we can't really eat less (over long term).
Your day to day metabolism is not that precise, nor are calorie counts on packaging.
What I mean I calculated that amount of extra fat I gained over so many decades and divided it by the number of days and converted to amount of teaspons of sugar.
(Also weird the use of word regulator for finance and other NGOs - but do they really adjust? What would a regulator that said “wow we are making too much profit this quarter, let’s slow down a bit boys we must be taking steam out of the rest of the economy”)
First is realising you want to get healthy to reduce weight. Not reduce weight to get healthier.
Understanding what causes disregulation which is mostly caused by and part of metabolic syndrome, which in turn is mostly insulin resistance. Almost every overweight and every obese person has some level of insulin resistance. Just because they are not officially classified as diabetic is because medical establishment needs binary definitions. I like to think diabetes typically starts early in childhood with a wrong diet but it takes decades for the accumulated damage to the body to start gaining weight and then can take some more decades for this in turn to cause diabetes.
How to fight this? Well... undoing insulin resistance is the way to go.
I started classified as prediabetic and currently have absolutely stellar scores on any measure like HBA1C, fasting/fed blood glucose, etc.
How I improved my insulin sensitivity:
* cut off all sugar, sweet or sweetened drinks, and most carbs (I still eat carbs, just much less of them). This also tends to help with hunger.
* Cut almost all snacking. If I need to snack, I have alternative snacks that do not raise blood sugar (fresh vegetables, fatty/protein snacks like beef jerky, etc.)
* Intermittent fasting -- I try to maintain short eating window throughout the day. Usually about 4-6 hours.
* Sometimes keto diet / longer fasts -- While I don't like the idea of staying on keto diet permanently, I think doing it from time to time exercises certain important chemical pathways. So is a water fast.
* Running in the morning in fasted state. Really forces body to get good at burning fat, promotes more and better mitochondria.
* Exercise after meals, especially if the meal contains carbs. Taking a walk right after a meal has clearing effect on blood glucose -- the muscles producing energy for movement are much more eager to clear blood sugars making it as if insulin is more sensitive. It is a trick, but if you do it every day the body does not care, from its point of view it uses X amount of insulin and it causes Y amount of sugar cleared.
* Never eat naked carbs. Carbs should always be accompanied by fat and protein which causes digestion to take longer time and effectively lowers maximum blood sugar levels.
* Better sleep and less stress -- stress causes the body to release cortisol which raises blood sugar levels which causes insulin. You want less stress if you want to lose weight. Running increases stress, unfortunately, but I think it is good tradeoff.
I actually lost 20kg over 6 month, roughly following this advice. Not strictly, like I would be more lenient on weekends with carbs & booze, and have sugar, like a small dark chocolate, but only at night (to avoid further craving and consumption the whole day). I avoided the exercise as it made me unbearably hungry.
I recommend this 100%
Hi, why do you say this? I mean I was a glutton (and still am), but I have been able to reduce the amount of food eaten by skipping dinner as a way of eating less. I've been at it for 2 years now, not long term maybe but medium term and I have no intention of stopping given the benefits I'm having.
And honestly? With those habits changed, I'd say I basically don't notice the difference. I'm not dieting now, and it's actually taken some effort to stop losing weight (which I just had a look at my calorie tracker app and realized accounting for thermic effects probably explains why 2750 naive calories is closer to 2275 if I'm targeting 120-150g of protein per day since now I chase muscle gains because it turns out I can get them).
Basically I eat better, and more frequently, then I did and enjoy it more. Which is to say: my bad habits were just unfulfilling, and as soon as I actually held myself accountable for the effects, the changes in my diet were all improvments in my overall quality of life.
But over a 6 year period, you would definitely accumulate 300 pounds of extra weight this way.
A 500cal surplus is quite a bit though, so if you set that you’d probably gain 20 lbs over time assuming you kept everything else equal.
What is this based on? The evidence I’ve seen is calorie restriction and exercise both increase one’s healthspan.
So over long periods of time, you consume almost exactly as much calories as you use.
The only way to consume less calories over your lifetime is to use less calories over your lifetime. And for this you need to move less.
So "calorie restriction" is opposite from higher activity levels (exercise).
Outside elite athletes, most people burn a significant minority of calories on physical activity [1]. Again, we have actual research around calorie restriction + exercise.
All people have a huge static component to the calories that are used by our bodies. But this component is pretty much the same for all people. Our livers, our hearts, our brains are all constructed the same and use the same amounts of energy.
Where our bodies differ for the static component is based on our activity levels. Our Basal Metabolic Rate is higher when we have active lifestyle and tend to be lower when we are sedentary.
So, again, to use less energy you have to move less because regular exercise will increase your BMR or (depending how you think about it) prevent it from dropping.
You can't have low basal metabolic rate AND be regularly exercising.
We have evidence time-restricted feeding reduces basal metabolic rates [1].
> to use less energy you have to move less
Most of us carry a lot of fat, particularly around the organs, that makes all sorts of processes from physical activity to the mundane inefficient. The point of calorie restriction, nutrition and exercise is to cut out that inefficiency. We have strong evidence it can be done. Per the article and reams of research.
The only catch is that the truly extreme cases have a notably higher energy requirement to stay alive (more tissue needs more energy), which could skew their numbers a bit to have somehow resembled a more active person.
We know calorie restriction + exercise works in mice. So this isn’t a thermodynamic problem. We in tech tend to think from first principles; calories in = calories out seems obvious. The problem is it’s misleadingly simplifying—there is a lot in between that is significant.
In any case, I don’t think this is therapeutically inclined. It’s simply hinting at an underlying mechanism we may be able to exploit.
Primarily because of improper muscle activation, and from their body weight making the exercise more intense.
Athletes increase their cardiovascular and metabolic throughput (i.e., allowing them to burn even more calories and thus work even harder), and repeating an activity increases muscle control, allowing more coordinated and balanced movements (e.g., keeping themselves and external weights balanced without erratic, wasteful compensatory movements). They might also have a diet that absorbs better, as athletes try to absorb absurd amounts of calories.
A larger person does have a higher base energy consumption, although this is not caused by inflammation - it's just that any tissue need energy. If this was not the case, even just a few kilocalories overeating would cause unbounded growth - instead, energy requirements for a person lie on a curve, and slight overeating for one body weight just means that you reach equilibrium at a slightly higher body weight, with any combination of food intake + activity + body composition having some (although possibly absurd) body mass equilibrium. Of course, being morbidly obese does introduce high risk of certain diseases that have an energy cost and waste (e.g., mismanaged diabetes and sugar in urine), but I consider that somewhat separate.
Caries in = calories out is a thermodynamic problem. Thermodynamics account for inefficient processes. If you take fewer calories in, it always means that your body will be doing less or taking its energy from elsewhere. The body has plenty of ways to do this, including reducing base metabolism at certain costs. The sheer number of backup plans the body has available for any particular function is fascinating, but they are generally all costlier than the primary ones.
However, do not let that deter you from exploring this further. Collecting data on health outcomes of human behaviors is almost impossible without massive datasets - can't exactly cage people up in labs to test them.
Not arguing it doesn't. Just that using thermodynamics to understand human metabolism is akin to trying to grok flight through Newtonian mechanics. You can do it. But mostly by working backwards from higher-level principles.
The evidence for that disconnect is this thread. CACO leads people to believe you can't decrease your calorie consumed and burned without also increasing physical activity levels. Yet that's empirically incorrect. Not because thermodyanmics doesn't apply. But that it applies in mechanisms so complex that starting from first principles doesn't work until you have the roadmap.
> slight overeating for one body weight just means that you reach equilibrium at a slightly higher body weight
Studies observing the effects of calorie restriction see improvements in a variety of biomarkers. That slightly-higher weight comes with higher inflammation, higher CVD frequencies and other nasties.
Based on my personal experience, whether you exercise or not you are still going to be miserable when on caloric restriction.
But when you are exercising your portions do not get so small. In fact, you could be eating exactly the same and if you add walking about 10km (6 miles) every day, you are putting yourself in a significant calorie deficit of about 600 kcal (adult male, regular height, a bit overweight).
While it does not matter where 600kcal deficit comes from from thermodynamic point of view, it makes dieting easier:
* The food portions have the size you are used to. Your stomach is used to about this kind of food. At least some satiety signals are going to be the same as before you started dieting.
* Exercising will preserve muscle mass. We have a mechanism where if the body needs to access stored energy it will spare the muscles that are being exercised. This is how bodybuilders are cutting -- during cutting phase they are reducing their fat without building new muscle but are still exercising. This exercising is necessary so that the body burns fat preferentially rather than going for muscle protein.
* Exercising seems to prevent most or all of BMR drop from calorie restriction. Normally, if you just reduce your calories without much activity, the body will start conserving energy in various ways (for example I felt cold on hot days which was super interesting feeling). If BMR drops, you need to reduce your food intake even further to ensure the same level of calorie restriction. And if you do not do this you might find that a) you have reduced your calorie intake and b) you are not losing weight. Terrible place to be in. Activity prevents that from happening.
Over the period of six month from May 2023 to October 2023 I logged:
* 2497km of combined walks and runs (about 80% walks and running the rest), about 13.6km a day on average
* 384h of activities (for about 2h 7m daily average)
* about 6.5km/h average activity speed. I walk at about 6km/h normally (sometimes faster, sometimes slower), some of the activity time is probably walking into groceries or standing in a queue for a coffee and some of the activities are runs.
* 709k steps in May * 775k steps in June * 792k steps in July * 808k steps in August * 713k steps in September * 618k steps in October
For a total of 4.4M steps in 6 months or about 24.2k steps a day, on average.
* as an interesting note, Garmin estimates that my activities burned 180 thousand kcalories which translates to 20kg of pure fat or about 23kg of adipose tissue (I have maintained my weight during that period, though). Hard to say how accurate this is.
So, yes, it is feasible. Though quite time consuming. I switched my entertainment needs to consuming audiobooks and whatever informational/educational content I could put my hands on that would be even remotely useful.
Note that this is the least traumatic way of calorie usage.
Between junk calories and inefficient metabolism from a sedentary lifestyle, almost everyone has this surplus in their energy balance.
But monitoring calorie intake vs expenditure really does make a difference. I went through multiple cycles of controlled 10kg+ weight gain and loss, and I must say that just by walking extra couple miles a day while enforcing the calorie limit can make all the difference.
What doesn't work for weight control is just doing more sports - this is easily compensated by hunger.
Because their bodies compensate by eating more and they are surprised they are not losing weight and they think that exercising does not work.
Which is completely wrong way to look at it. You want to get healthier to lose weight not lose weight to get healthier. And exercise is one of the best ways to help you get healthier even if it does not directly and immediately lead to losing weight.
If you combine calorie deficit, a body that is in dire need of energy, high fasting insulin leading to inability to reach into fat stores, underdeveloped mitochondria making burning fat even more difficult, your result is body that prioritises burning protein for fuel.
If you exercise not only the body gets signal to preserve the tissue and muscles that are being loaded, but also keeps building mitochondria that are necessary to effectively burn more fat.
I would hope people exercise to a limited extent anyway, to the extent their bodies will try retain a baseline level of muscle-stength needed day to day.
As you've read on my other comment, I lost 20kg over 6 months on a low carb, low sugar, higher protein diet. I started gyming about 4/5 months in and I personally attribute this gyming with a chain-reaction that led to me putting the weight back on and am now in a much worse position health wise, even muscle wise. This all due to practical reasons, such as increased appetite which upset the hard-fought dietary and hunger equilibrium I reached.
Exercising too is I'm sure definitely better but I feel is way more difficult and sets many, on the weightloss journey, up to fail.
I went down from 93kg to 78 and then from 90kg to 78. I didn't go for low carb or sugar, just ensured enough protein and overall calorie deficit. Right now I am just carefully float around 80 kg.
This, and moderate excercise (kettlebells, some weightlifting, walking) made things relatively easy as I just made sure I stayed in an overall deficit.
One more point: it's the running weight average matters, not daily measurements.
Regular exercise causes people to be hungry and compensate for the additional activity. That's normal.
But I probably am feeling and healthier than I would if I wasn't running.
As an example, my body got rid of all the skin folds. I should have flappy loose skin around my belly and I should have old looking skin on my face. Instead my body, being much healthier than if I was just restricting calories, is able to break up and use that extra tissue and got rid of all that skin naturally.
I learned that a doctors evaluating people who lost significant amount of fat can guess pretty correctly at the method the person used to lose the weight just based on how their skin looks like.
Which is to say, it's too simplistic a model to talk about "breathing twice as fast" as explaining what's going on.
I'm curious about nighttime vs daytime breathing. I was under the impression that sleeping person breaths deeper than resting person. At least you can tell the exact moment somebody falls asleep because they start to breath deeply and loudly.
i don't know where you pulled the data about 10k steps, but even if it was accurate, it would depend a great deal on how much weight. At my weight, running (!) for 30 minutes burns a mere 200 calories.
I switched to weight lifting, walking a lot and some kettlebell training for weight control after running for many years. Running is great but in my case resulted in joint and back problems.
One surprising thing about walking vs running is that running doesn't burn all that much calories compared to the effort it requires. While I can integrate walking into my daily routine (15-30 minutes in the morning, at lunch time and in the evening), running needs at least 1.5-2 hours per day.
> most of the calories burnt are just so the body can maintain itself (basal metabolism), not from the exercise!
When reporting how many calories are burned through exercise, people usually count what is in addition to being at rest/sedentary. But the total reported by this calculator includes the basal rate. That's why it's so high.
Again, you're missing the other side of the comparison implied by "restriction"—restricted from what? You can't just avoid calories entirely.
From baseline. Which for almost every person is higher than is healthy.
> can't just avoid calories entirely
Who said this? Even the title says “eating less” not “starve and die.”
And at every step, they hear that they surely eat too much.
Curious to see research showing eating disorders are driven by misguided pursuits of health.
> Increasing amount of population eats significantly less then they need and are terrified of eating more
"The overall incidence rate of anorexia nervosa is considerably stable over the past decades," though it's increasing "among younger persons (aged <15 years)" [1]. ("For bulimia nervosa, there has been a decline in overall incidence rate over time.")
Meanwhile, obesity is increasing globally [2].
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31051507/
Or for easy to read https://anad.org/eating-disorder-statistic/#:~:text=General%....
You're comparing a study which specifically aims–in part–to measure prevalence, which I cited, to one which literally says "the difference in and evolution of the tools used for the evaluation and classifications of [eating disorders] make it difficult to evaluate the evolution of prevalence over time" [1].
Perhaps read your sources before concluding bad faith?
[1] https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/782868/1-s2.0-S000291651...
And yes, eating diaorders among young people are on the rise, both in boys and girls. When people complain about social media and mental health of young people, that is the primary concern.
Plus, you can have eating disorder and be fat, while your body lacking whole host of nutrition.
"Orthorexia nervosa is not listed in the offical ICD-11 and DSM-V classifications of mental disorders" and "there is still no officially accepted definition of ON, or standardised criteria of its diagnosis" [1]. As such, it's difficult to characterise its prevalence.
You said "eating disorders are on the rise." That's not true outside a narrow cohort, and among them, there is no evidence it's driven by misguided pursuits of health. What we do have evidence of is increasing obesity.
Why not just say "eat baseline calories"? Assuming everyone is overweight is weird.
This is like saying “everything in moderation.” What’s moderation? The whole point is drawing the new baseline.
> Assuming everyone is overweight is weird
Again, straw man. Nobody said as much. What is suggested by the research is we eat and expend more calories than is efficient.
Presumably, not always "less than what you're currently doing".
The conclusion should be:
1. Eating less leads to better body composition and less internal organ strain in general.
2. Reasonable amounts of physical activity leads to better calorie utilisation and improved body composition.
3. It is absolutely possible to both eat less and do more sports.
4. Both eating less and doing more sports can damage the body. Say, running can damage one's joints, and undereating leads to muscle loss.
As in most things in life it's the balance that is important to get right, not just blindly following statistical insights that are mostly useless on an individual's level.
It is not (just) a correlation.
There is direct relation between what your body needs as energy and what calories are in your food. It is true for each and every single person, not just statistically over entire population.
Our bodies are physical entities that follow physical laws of conservation of energy. Because we can't create energy from nothing, every calorie expended as heat or work has to be consumed.
The only way to eat less calories is to expend less heat and work.
Calorie restriction compared to what? You need calories to live.
Regular stress is causing things to get stronger.
Running every day can be not good for the knees, if you increase the volume too quickly without giving the joints and tendons necessary time to strengthen up, if you suddenly introduce too much stress (try to sprint when you have never done it before), if you don't sleep well or give time for them to recover, if you have bad diet or if you are sick for some reason and your body has impaired ability to recover.
It can decompose for example muscle and other connective tissue (which actually is quite important to be healthy), but it does limit ability to build tissue.
Lesson from bodybuilding crowd is that you need to eat protein with every meal if you are serious about building anything. They want to build muscle but it really extends to all tissues of our body.
I have nothing against veganism and vegetarianism. It is a lofty goal.
But strictly on health standpoint, no amount or kind of plant food can (currently) beat healthy whole animal tissue (you should really eat more than just meat and also not all animals are same way healthy to eat).
Now, this doesn't mean there can't be better plant-derived foods in the future. A protein is a protein is a protein.
The problem with plant based protein is they come in wrong concentrations, wrong combinations, they are missing some stuff or they have extra things that make protein more difficult to absorb. If we can fix these points, we can have healthy plant based diets.
But really the main benefit of meat is that you get close to the right concentrations of everything by very definition. If you eat whole animal, that is. We have evolved to eat meat and only evolved to eat plants to supplement some small things (mainly vitamin C and to eat fructose and alcohol to get fat for the winter).
With this, any stupid person can eat relatively healthy diet. You just put a steak in your mouth and you are 80% of the way there.
On the other hand eating healthy diet on plants is a difficult task requiring planning and diligence that I think half of the population is simply not equipped with brain power to execute correctly.
We evolved as opportunists and generalists. Humans are capable of taking nutrition from plants or animals.
> and only evolved to eat plants to supplement some small things
I believe this is backwards. There are examples of hunter-gatherer societies with meat-dominant diets, but more typically hunter-gatherer diets were/are predominantly plant-based. In most environments hunting was a less reliable source of food and more opportunistic.
> But really the main benefit of meat is that you get close to the right concentrations of everything by very definition.
Not really. Maybe if you were eating chimp... but chickens have very different compositions to cows, pigs, salmon or polar bears.
> You just put a steak in your mouth and you are 80% of the way there.
It really isn't that simple. For example, it is well established that excessive red meat consumption raises the risk of colorectal cancer and other bad things.
Well yes but no. Large brains were largely made possible by the fact we mastered fire (mostly to cook meat). Look at gorillas, they eat plants and spend most of their waking life to forage for food. Having even larger brains means that foraging would be impossible to sustain a modern human's constitution.
I keep having small injuries here and there. The difference is that I am currently running 70km a week on average (7-10km on most week days, 10-21.1km on Sundays). My leg muscles are hard as rocks and my Achilles tendons are twice as tough as before (based on the increased cross section based on the images I have). It is much harder to evaluate load capacity of my knees (I don't have images to compare) but it is easy to see If I just started running 10k every day (even if I was able to do it aerobically) I would probably blow my knees in less than a month.
Additionally, I suffer from torn ACL and before I started running my knee was kinda lose which made even walking a bit difficult (constant popping sounds, pains, etc.) Thanks to running and strength training the stronger muscles and other tendons took the slack off my knee and I pretty much forgot that there is anything wrong with it. I just need to pay attention to not get carried off too much and start doing some stupid shit like playing soccer or basketball which would definitely be a bad idea. As long as my activity has controlled moves like running or hiking in not too difficult terrain, I am fine.
Is that universally true? Not every system in our body is so anti-fragile.
I walk a lot, but whenever I tried running, I had immediate problems with both joints and inflamed muscle. My guess is "too many hard surfaces". We are definitely not naturally adapted to pavements and asphalt.
But training in an uneven terrain will, over time, strengthen your other muscles and tendons that do not get much workout on pavement. It is important to understand if you want to move to running in uneven terrain you have to reduce your volume initially, pretty considerably, to give time to adjust.
As to your problems with inflamed muscles and joints -- I have some experience with this I can share.
First is that your aerobic capacity develops much faster than your joints and tendons, especially if you are older. It takes years of regular running to get your joints and tendons to be able to accept daily high mileage running.
There is no other way than to start small (say 1-2 miles every other day) and slowly, slowly build it up and react every time you have any problems (by stalling your build up to get time to catch up).
Connective tissue reacts best to high, non-repetitive loading. The fastest way to improve your tendons and knees is to start lifting heavy shit. That's why all pro runners are also going to the gym to lift weights. Not because they want to build muscle (you don't want muscle especially in legs because you need to move that mass back and forth) but because it strengthens joints and tendons and makes your legs more resilient to stress. Also, stronger core muscles help maintain good posture throughout long run preventing injuries.
Personally, I found walking is an excellent supplement to running. Walking long distances regularly will also strengthen things with less chance for an acute injury. I have even started walking with a loaded backpack (read up on rucking).
I've been running every single day no exceptions for almost 8 years, including marathons and a half marathon at least once a year. Most of my runs are slow, all of them are run with small steps and fore/mid foot strike.
Stomping around the track huffing and puffing is not the way to do it, but when done right it is absolutely wonderful for the body.
Running properly is part of the way to avoid injury.
I had 3 knee surgeries over the years and have arthritis in that knee and actually running with OA seems to be an ok thing to do, which seems to correlate with my experience that my knee pain is less when I run than when I don't.
As usual, there's lots of nuance and it depends on the person and the situation!
You need to consume less calories to have longest maximum achievable age (again, not proven in humans).
You need to move more to have longest achievable healthy age (this is much better documented).
Personally, I prefer to be healthier for longer even if it means I will live shorter in absolute terms.
I am running every day which hopefully will help me have denser and more robust bones and joints and tendons. And I am lifting weights so that I still have some muscle into old age when they inevitably start to shrink. Core muscles are important to prevent fragility as we age.